Anyone who enters the White House Remix Contest could win, as there haven’t been any entries

I’m lifting the deadline for the White House Flickr Photo Remixing Contest, as nobody entered. I’m disappointed in all of you, but it’s ok. I’ll let it slide. Not to say that the contest is going away. If you get anything ever completed (all of you out-of-work designers, I’m looking in your direction, as you have more time on your hands), post it and I’ll pimp you and your site.

The NHL shoots and scores with the Penguins/Capitals series (and the origin of the hat trick)

Ovechkin and Crosby – New Best Friends Forever by clydeorama, on Flickr

Are you watching the NHL Playoffs this year? Because you should be, especially the Washington Capitals vs. Pittsburgh Penguins series. Last night’s game was epic, with Alex Ovechkin picking up the Caps and carrying them past the Sidney Crosby and the Pens for a win. Both Ovechkin and Crosby tallied hat tricks, which is crazy. You’ve got the three best players in the NHL playing this series, with Evgeni Malkin naturally being up there, too (and the probably MVP this year). Go watch the video in the link above to better understand what is happening. Some unbelievable hockey happening.

This is everything the NHL needs to try to regain market share lost from the recent lockout. I’m sure most every fan is hoping to see this go seven tightly contested games. But so are the NHL, Versus and NBC executives, who are still trying to replace the viewership (and revenue) lost from the lockout a few years back. And to be honest, I miss the NHL on ESPN (having multiple channels that could broadcast multiple games at the same time could avoid dumb shit like this. But I’m sure ESPN would rather broadcast some NBA games, as they currently do. More people watch, and there are probably lots more ad dollars to be had. It appears to me that the NHL is going to be on Versus for a long time, which is sort of a bummer (although I will say their broadcasts have been much better this year compared to last).

While talking about the game, Ryan asked about the origins of the term hat trick, and I had no idea (for shame). Check out the awesome history about hat tricks.

Flying Dog Brewery website redesign

I’ve realized over the previous year that I haven’t really posted many blog entries about the design I do for Flying Dog Brewery. So hopefully as I do some cool projects, I’ll be posting about them from time to time.

We launched a new(ish) website last week. The short story about why it’s newish is that we didn’t have a large budget for the project to do a complete website overhaul. Our previous website, while serviceable, was dated. So we kept most of the content as is, but redesigned all the style sheets to create a website that essentially looked like we made a brand new website.

Part of the updating was to factor in our social media activation (Twitter, blogging, flickr) to allow for our consumers to have a centralized place where they could quickly figure out what we’ve been up to. The result is a better organized, better looking, better performing website.

We couldn’t have done it without the talent of Jeremy Bamford and Flatirons Internet. Flatirons was responsible for coding the site, and in a very timely manner.

There are still some kinks to work out, but websites being what they are, are always a work in progress. I’m pretty happy with the result, what do you think?